Katja Simon is the 77th German Wine Princess—one of two who share the title “77” (the other is Emma Meinhardt from the Saale-Unstrut wine region; the 77th German Wine Queen Anna Zenz from the Mosel region, whom we’ve already featured here in the podcast “Auf ein Glas”). She is—as the candid snapshot above perhaps shows—a princess of the cheerful and upbeat variety, but she also has a lot to say. She knows a lot, she explains things well—and she does it all with wonderful naturalness, which (like her colleagues in office) sets her fabulously apart from outdated notions about wine royalty.
Katja Simon hails from the Hessian Bergstraße, a region that’s usually a blank spot on the map even for well-informed wine connoisseurs. Is it because, at 440 hectares (as of 2025, source: DWI), it’s currently the second-smallest wine-growing region? Incidentally, the “smallest of the small” is the Middle Rhine—with just one hectare less… Or is it because the Hessian Bergstraße has only existed as an independent wine-growing region since 1971 (before that, it was part of the Bergstraße along with the Baden Bergstraße—now one of the nine regions in Baden)? Regardless, it’s certainly not because there’s nothing worth tasting between the Stachelberg in the north and the Eckweg in the south.
